The chamber works that Morton Feldman wrote in the last decade of his life are among the most beautiful and extraordinary composed in the second half of the 20th century. Completed in 1979, String Quartet No 1 was one of the earliest of those pieces and, playing for just 90 minutes, it's also one of the more compact – Feldman's Second Quartet, composed four years later, lasts for five hours. But what is characteristic is the way that he creates a compelling musical world out of a frugal collection of elements – a sequence of quiet chords; flurries of pizzicatos; lonely, wandering melodies; sudden sharp fortissimos – and their constantly varied repetitions. The Flux Quartet sustain this fragile web with tender care; their performance has to be split across two CDs (though a DVD is also included for those who prefer to hear it without a break), and the second disc includes two, much briefer, equally spare quartets from the beginning of Feldman's career: Structures of 1951 and Three Pieces of 1954-56.